Related papers: Analysing Russian Trolls via NLP tools
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern-day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious…
Amidst growing concern over media manipulation, NLP attention has focused on overt strategies like censorship and "fake news'". Here, we draw on two concepts from the political science literature to explore subtler strategies for government…
With the proliferation of social media over the last decade, determining people's attitude with respect to a specific topic, document, interaction or events has fueled research interest in natural language processing and introduced a new…
An-ever increasing number of social media websites, electronic newspapers and Internet forums allow visitors to leave comments for others to read and interact. This exchange is not free from participants with malicious intentions, which do…
The Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out a broad information campaign in the U.S. before and after the 2016 presidential election. The organization created an expansive set of internet properties: web domains, Facebook…
Traditional methods of collecting user feedback through transit surveys are often time-consuming, resource intensive, and costly. In this paper, we propose a novel NLP-based framework that harnesses the vast, abundant, and inexpensive data…
One of the key aspects of the United States democracy is free and fair elections that allow for a peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next. The 2016 US presidential election stands out due to suspected foreign influence…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing…
This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US…
The field of NLP has seen unprecedented achievements in recent years. Most notably, with the advent of large-scale pre-trained Transformer-based language models, such as BERT, there has been a noticeable improvement in text representation.…
Increasing popularity of Twitter in politics is subject to commercial and academic interest. To fully exploit the merits of this platform, reaching the target audience with desired political leanings is critical. This paper extends the…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In…
The current study yielded a number of important findings. We managed to build a neural network that achieved an accuracy score of 91 per cent in classifying troll and genuine tweets. By means of regression analysis, we identified a number…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do business, but also the way we perform daily activities. In fact, the past Presidential elections in the United States as well as those in Great Britain (Brexit) and in…
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the…
In a separate study, we were interested in understanding people's Q&A habits on Twitter. Finding questions within Twitter turned out to be a difficult challenge, so we considered applying some traditional NLP approaches to the problem. On…